Guy Rundle’s ever-watchful eye on the outpourings at Surry Hills. And other media tidbits of the day …

The escalator of decline (part 3). There are signs The Australian isn’t feeling the love. Our exegesis of Paul “eeyore” Kelly’s “escalator of decline” article last week is said to have got Surry Hills very miffed, since they believe it to be a staggering work of thundering genius etc etc. Indeed, in one of those grand slams that only the Oz and the Pyongyang Daily can do, Chris Kenny devoted half of his Saturday column to saying how great Kelly’s piece was, how he was the transcendent political sage of our era etc etc. Kelly, he said, was writing from “the fulcrum”. The fulcrum? We thought he was on the escalator of decline. Ah well.

Soon after this in-house tongue-bath, the Spectator Australia published an online leader entitled “Our Best Newspaper”, and defending the Government Gazette from its critics — most recently Margaret Simons in The Monthly. Surprising to some, since Speccie Oz editor Tom Switzer was edged out as op-ed editor of The Oz, due to his opposition to the Iraq War (rumour is he came in particular conflict with Michael Stutchbury, who later became an Oz unperson himself, and a target of the two-minute hate, after he fled to the Fin).

But maybe the jockeying to succeed Chris Mitchell has already begun. Doubtless, the Oz does cover more territory than most, but it would want to — it is subsidised to the tune of $1 per issue. Every time you pick up one of those freebies at the airport, you are literally being paid three dollars to read it — or six bucks on the weekend (foregone cover price + $1 loss). With that sort of money, it should solve the Riemann hypothesis and give you a shiatsu. — Guy Rundle

He’s got a Twitter account and he’s not afraid to use it. Perhaps to set a good example for his journalists (some of whom, as Crikey revealed yesterday, have been told to get 1000 Twitter followers by next June), Age editor-in-chief Andrew Holden joined Twitter last month. He’s already gotten into the swing of things, as this tweet from yesterday demonstrates:

Holden’s counterpart at the Sydney Morning Herald, Darren Goodsir, is already on Twitter (and has been since 2009). But we’re missing the Fin’s Michael Stutchbury. You’re letting the Fairfax side down Stutch …

“The story was run in Australia only and not made available to any other territory.”

But a quick look shows the story created quite a splash in South Africa. Plenty of South African journalists were tweeting about the video. For example, Mandy Wiener, a senior reporter at South Africa’s Eye Witness News (not to be confused with the Channel 10 version) posted a widely retweeted link to the video on Sunday morning. Another South African journalist who’s been live-tweeting the trial, Barry Bateman, has posted links to the promo of the Sunday Night feature, and lots of screenshots from the video as well. Much of the episode has since been posted online (though it may be geo-blocked). Even if it was geo-blocked, these days it’s impossible to effectively deny someone access to anything they can view on the internet. A VPN is all you need …

Work for the BBC? The BBC already has a commercial team in Australia, and according to this job ad, they’re hiring a journalist. It’s yet another example of global publishers sourcing content here to serve a local audience (all the better to sell local ads). Applications to be the Beeb’s senior writer/commissioner in Australia close Monday.

Front page of the day. Clive Palmer has admitted he used funds paid to him by a Chinese mining firm to pay for his election campaign (but claims the money was “like a salary” so he did nothing wrong). Here he is in the Courier-Mail.

For all the wrong reasons, I loved Chris Kenny’s weekend piece, and the editorial in the same edition, which amounted to “we’re right and everyone else is wrong”. It’s a position which ticks a lot of boxes on the diagnosis checklist for various personality disorders, but we’re talking about a newspaper, not a person - so tags like ‘narcissistic’, ‘psychotic’ and ‘megalomaniacal’ probably don’t apply. Then again, neither do terms like ‘logic’, ‘consistency’, ‘compassion’ or ‘objectivity’.

How many Mudorc readers would even know the point of the Manchurian Candidate?
This is the constant puzzle about the Oz - it is so dumb that it must really piss off those who can’t, due to ideological constipation, bring themselves to read a real newspaper.
Why don’t they feel insulted and demeaned by the drivel herein?